OUTSIDER ART NEW POEM BY TODD SWIFT

Outsider ArtIt's been what - decades? -since she lifted that dressin summer and desired herselfas if I was a mirrorin Darger's dishevelled room.Her lithe innocence armedwith a drawn pistolas she fingered danger

like an artist teaching herselfto make insistent actionsof a lonely hand not someremote errors only

of eccentricity, alsoachieved release; passionateas any acolyte, showed methe new work her brushstrokesmade, materials not yet dry.I, the appreciative criticof her rude education.It's sad to reflect on moments

not so art-preserved; not storedeven dustily in homely atticsto be ignored; most incidents of sexor pathos have no catalogueor connoisseurs; static in timeare still left just where they happenedat first blush, never flow like artforever outwards into an always now.

No one recalls her crouchingas she gazed down at her clitorisand enjoyed a homemade blissof blossoming isolated chance,her tennis shoes curlingas her feet inside curled as well;her gasping, unrelenting, archedagainst the rough wall, then floor,

baring her trimmed moundfor my focus, as if an iconthat made prayer happenby its very appearance.No one preserved those minutesthat gave more pleasure to usthan twenty-five years growing to them;or twenty-five that drove us from them.

It's gone, her artistry, my awe;the flaw is time's uncurated disarraythat has no theory to conservedaring whimpers of touch, discoveryunless marbled in statuary,rubbed in stone or etched to last.The past is a sacked museumlooted by the lack of sympathy

or dedication in history's tedious medium,which dates and signs nothingunless a daring artist demands a stayof execution and enforces imprature;even forlorn Darger had his newspapersto print murders of children for hisrecollection; their little morbiditieshis lit candles to remind, even collect

a sense of providence or valuein what is taken and ruined in the rushof incidental undertakings of the day.He decided to compose out of trashand confusing desire, genders mixedlike colours, girls with their cocksunder threat of death, all blendedbecause loved and cared for, endlessly.

You can find those images if you want,because someone wanted themto be seen; they were placedin the world, out of a realmthat the world cannot hold onto,or ascertain - the imagined spaceswhere what may happen gets displacedby what merely does, unsparingly.

It took time to reassemble tortureinto the virtue of a new domain;and some demons' prayer-booksare written by misplaced angels this way.So her perfected small abysmof ecstatic rippling effects acrossher sojourning body in that summerremains wordless, without music

or imagery, only herselfin her spasms as she camedrew on me, for once and then againalways, a dream senseof what shared, true good painyoung love-desire could bein our offered, offering prime.Her short cotton dress, yellow,or blue, or cream, or pink,is in some hip shop, or on a high shelf;her hands who thinks what they shape now?Only this poem adores that hour's mad show.